With a backdrop of the Tenmile Range, Stephen Karp, an instructor with the Copper Mountain Ski and Ride School, makes his way down to the Timberline Express lift on a bluebird day at Copper Mountain, Colo., Thursday morning, Jan. 12, 2012.

Doug and Heather Klof, who in March moved from out of state as part of DaVita's relocation, are closing soon on a house. "I came to visit in Februarty and fell in love with Denver," Heather said.

Doug and Heather Klof moved to Denver from Los Angeles via Portland in March as part of DaVita’s corporate relocation.

“I came to visit in February and fell in love with Denver,” said Heather Klof. “It was a very easy move for us and a good transition. We are happy here.”

Sam and Isobel Brooks and their 2-year-old son, Alex, came to Boulder County in August from New York, without jobs lined up.

“My primary reason for moving was to give my son a good environment to live in,” Sam Brooks said. “I had my heart set to come here, and nothing was going to deter me. It was going to happen.”

The two couples are among the 31,195 people the U.S. Census Bureau estimates relocated last year to Colorado from other states, after subtracting out those who left. The figures don’t include immigrants moving to the state from outside the U.S.

Colorado ranked fifth among states for domestic net migration, in total numbers, after Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Washington.

That’s an improvement from the state’s 10th-place ranking from 2001 to 2009.

Among 25- to 44-year-olds, the age group launching careers and forming families, Colorado was the most popular state for those relocating, said state demographer Elizabeth Garner.

Let Florida and Arizona have their retirees — Colorado is drawing people like the Klofs, both 32, and Sam, 30, and Isobel Brooks, 28.

Doug Klof moved to Denver to work at the headquarters of DaVita, a provider of kidney dialysis services that announced it would relocate its headquarters from California to Denver in 2009.

Although Heather has struggled to find a job, she has kept busy volunteering in the Highland neighborhood.

Heather said Colorado offers a good middle ground between her family in Wisconsin and Doug’s in Oregon, and the couple, who are expecting a child, are closing soon on a house in the Sloan’s Lake neighborhood.

Michelle Ackerman, a real estate broker at Redfin who helped the Klofs find their home, estimates that people relocating from out of state represented about 60 percent of her business last year.

“Many of the buyers I have worked with tell me it is Colorado’s low property taxes, quality of life pertaining to crime and traffic, our many outdoor activities and relatively low housing prices,” she said.

Sam Brooks said he has lived in 10 states and visited all but Maine and Hawaii. Three stood out to him: New York, Colorado and Alaska.

Alaska, while beautiful, was short on sunshine. New York offers a lot, but the cost of living is high, the commutes are long and the people aren’t always friendly.

“Colorado has the best of everything,” he said, noting the move was the fulfillment of a five-year plan to get to the state.

After five months of searching for work, Brooks found a job at Gaiam that he started Monday. He said the same salary made in New York would stretch about $10,000 to $15,000 further, even living in Boulder County.

“Downtown Boulder is kind of like the Village, just with different kinds of weirdos,” he said.

Garner, the state demographer, said Colorado’s difficult job market hasn’t deterred people, given that times are tough almost everywhere.

Colorado has a big bulge of people in the 45-to-65 age range, many of whom moved here in the 1970s and ’80s.

Those people are “aging out” of the labor force, being replaced by younger workers.

“Basically, this means that we are creating new jobs for people but they are not new jobs at the firm,” Garner said.

That said, Colorado’s in-migration numbers are much lower than they were in the ’90s, and they haven’t been strong enough to lift the construction industry out of the doldrums.

Single-family housing permits have averaged at just over 8,000 a year the past three years, a far cry from the more than 38,000 a year pulled between 2003 and 2005, according to the Colorado Business Economic Outlook from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Colorado still has about 130,000 more housing units than it needs because of overbuilding last decade, Garner estimates. Even if in-migration holds up at current levels, it will take years for the newcomers to absorb the surplus housing.

Still, Colorado remains the sole magnet for domestic in-migration in a once-popular region that has fallen off the charts.

Last year, Colorado’s domestic net migration was 15 times that of New Mexico and more than double Arizona’s.

Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Kansas and Nebraska actually lost more U.S.-born residents to other states than they gained, census figures show.

Aldo Svaldi has worked at The Denver Post since 2000. His coverage areas have included residential real estate, economic development and the Colorado economy. He's also worked for Financial Times Energy, the Denver Business Journal and Arab News.

Doing business in Denver since late 2018, San Francisco-based marketing tech firm Iterable is taking part in its first Denver Startup Week. Not only is it an event sponsor, but it taking part in the startup crawl program, showing off its new office, and the Startup Week job fair Wednesday night.